The transition, which AdAge’s anonymous industry sources say will begin in the first half of 2013, will stick video commercials in your browser, tablet, and phone. Annoying, right? But what could be even worse is that there’s no play button:

In what’s sure to be a controversial move, the visual component of the Facebook video ads will start playing automatically — a dynamic known as “autoplay” — according to two of the executives.

This means an ad for Bacardi (if you’re targeted as a drinker) will show up upon your arrival at The Book and start flashing without any intervention—”Facebook is still debating whether to have the audio component of the ads activated automatically as well,” says AdAge. That latter part seems unthinkable, given how universally-despised audio ads are. A total web faux pas. Unlike obscure, opaque image sub-licensing, automatically playing a cereal jingle when you go to Facebook seems like the kind of thing that actually drive people away from using Facebook. At least as regularly.

Yes, Facebook is free. And yes, ads on Facebook are only going to multiply and advance. But that doesn’t mean we can’t challenge auto-play video commercials with spontaneous sound as idiotic and obnoxious. But for now, this is just a rumor—keep your eyes and ears peeled. In the meantime, we’ve reached out to Facebook for comment. [Ad Age]

Interestingly, despite being trumped as a much ballyhooed savior for magazines, it seems few Americans regularly use a tablet to browse their favorite magazines (10 percent or less across age groups).

Nonetheless, the findings point to a mobile future for reading.

As we discussed last week, books and magazines are the fastest growing mobile content category by audience growth. News is the fourth largest content category by audience size and continues to show significant audience growth.

Whether mobile growth in news and books will be able to make up for lost offline or desktop-based revenue is another question. E-books typically cost much less than their print counterparts, for example. However, for ad-supported content, the huge growth in tablets sales should be welcome news because tablets are a much more promising ad platform than smartphones.

The partnership was innovative because it asked all Facebook members to vote on ads, instead of just a panel of a handful of people selected by USA Today. And it brought the power of social media to an inherently social event on behalf of a stolidly traditional media property.

But no more.

This year the newspaper is going it alone — again. It’s told Facebook its services are no longer needed. Publisher Larry Kramer told Ad Age:

“We want to do this ourselves because we’re going to do a lot of these,” he said. “We need to build the apparatus ourselves do we’d own it.”

“Look, Facebook is great and we like working with them, but if you look at this organization today top to bottom vs. a year ago, we’re a lot more digital … And we need to build that internally.”

The Ad Meter’s qualifications for being the nation’s top rater of Super Bowl ads have previously been called into question. It doesn’t measure halftime ads, even though those ads — such as Clint Eastwood’s “Halftime in America” spot for Chrysler — are some of the most talked-about commercials.

Whether it’s because of regulation, a conservative outlook, or simply because they don’t see the benefit, some industries have been incredibly slow to embrace the digital age.

However, even in the industries where it’s not widely adopted, making significant investments in digital technology and integrating it into an organization has a significant positive impact on the bottom line. Capgemeni Consulting estimates that ‘digital beginners,’ those companies who have barely touched digital technology are 24 percent less profitable than average.

“‘Beginners’ have barely started, usually because they’re unaware of the opportunities, ‘Fashionistas’ adopt the newest or sexiest digital innovations, but without a cohesive strategy or eye to maximizing business value, ‘Digital Conservatives’ have a cohesive vision, but are slow to invest in new technology, and finally, the ‘Digirati,’ who both invest in digital and integrate it with their whole organization.”

Here’s where major industries fit on the spectrum of going digital, from high technology at the top, to the pharmaceutical industry way at the bottom:

They have 1 billion users, but that’s not Facebook’s only amazing statistic. There are a lot more, starting with a staggering 1.13 trillion likes. One point thirteen trillion likes, people. It’s crazy. Here are the rest of their stats, compiled since the first day of Facebook:

Over 1.13 trillion likes

since launch in February 2009. Wow.

140.3 billion friend connections

to one billion total users. Is everyone connected to everyone or what, Kevin Bacon?

219 billion photos.

These are photos actually in the system, not including the deleted ones. They believe they have had 265 billion photos in their servers since fall 2005. Flickr is weeping.

17 billion location-tagged posts,

including check-ins as of September 10, 2012—since August 2010.

210,000 years of music played so far.

62.6 million songs that have been played 22 billion times. The most staggering fact about this: their music-listening app only started in September 2011 and this data is from September 11, 2012.

More useless but neat facts:

• Facebook says that the median age of the user is about 22 years.

• The top five countries, in alphabetical order, where people connected from since the 1 billion user record was achieved: Brazil, India, Indonesia, Mexico and the United States.

Meanwhile, other aspirational brands like Tiffany & Co. and Restoration Hardware are struggling.

Michael Kors succeeded because it was the first retailer to hit the market’s sweet spot: people with money to spend but who aren’t rich.

Luxury marketing expert Pam Danziger calls these people HENRYs, for “High Earners Not Rich Yet.” They are the people who make between $100,000 and $250,000, she says.

HENRYs are a growing segment, while the wealthiest people are making less than they used to.

Danziger explained the concept to us in a recent note:

Ultra-affluents (i.e. those at the top 2 percent of U.S. households with incomes starting at $250,000) cut their spending by nearly 30 percent from 2010, while the HENRYs (High Earners Not RichYet with incomes $100,000-$249,999) increased their spending on luxury by some 11 percent from 2009 levels. Even though HENRYs individually have a far lower spending threshold than ultra-affluents, there are nearly ten HENRY households for every ultra-affluent. That is why with a total of 21.3 million households, the HENRY segment is a critically important part of the consumer market.

With Michael Kors’ $450 handbags and $250 watches, HENRYs can show off their success without feeling like they’re going overboard.

Kors wisely chose the exact right audience, and now it’s pay! ing off.

Age says Facebook’s advertising tool applies a hashtag to terms such as “morning sickness,” “ultrasound” and “pregnancy test” and can then serve ads against them. But Facebook declined to come out and say that it uses posts made by users to identify pregnant women (or other consumers going through a life change that might require a large number of new purchases):

Facebook, for its part, said it rarely uses the content of status updates as a signal for ad targeting.

But Facebook is careful to note that it doesn’t use the content of status updates to target pregnant women.

Finally, a spokesperson told Age:

“Not all advertisers are created equally in terms of how they define privacy as opposed to how we define privacy,” he said.

Facebook’s clients, however, told Age that they can use the site to ID pregnant women.

Café Mom VP-Marketing Kristina Tipton said her team has identified a Facebook audience of more than a million women who are likely to be pregnant or may have recently been so by anonymously targeting specific keywords that show up in users’ conversations … Ms. Tipton has been told by her Facebook rep that this process includes people who have mentioned the terms in their posts as well as users who have added those terms to their profile.

T! he big s urprise in the article is when Age all but accuses Facebook of lying:

Certainly there’s a gap between what marketers say they are being told and Facebook tells a journalist on the record.

LIONSGATE HAS PUT ITS $400 MILLION MEDIA ACCOUNT IN REVIEW: The incumbents are Initiative and Mindshare; Horizon will also compete, Ad Age says. “Hunger Games” and “Twilight” are among the titles on the business.

LendingTree picked a new creative shop, Merkley + Partners, and will break its first campaign in the spring. The New York shop beat McK! inney in Durham, N.C., and Anthem Worldwide in San Francisco for the business. Spending is ~$22 million.

Digital Consigliere

Dr. Augustine Fou is Digital Consigliere to marketing executives, advising them on digital strategy and Unified Marketing(tm). Dr Fou has over 17 years of in-the-trenches, hands-on experience, which enables him to provide objective, in-depth assessments of their current marketing programs and recommendations for improving business impact and ROI using digital insights.